Vee Back.

Hello lovely ladies (and really I expect only an ever shrinking cohort of ladies of the Internet at large) who have the patience to watch me periodically dust the cobwebs off of the old blog and whinge about how lucky I am to extract out of infertility three probably robustly healthy children, armed solely with the powers of the good people of mastercard.

Yes, you. Hello.

It’s been a while again and I fully blame raising three year old twins, one who sounds like she has a particularly hard to shake pack-a-day habit and who, unfortunately for all of our reposes or lack thereof is the I-Do-Not-Do-Discomfort-No-Matter-How-Minor Naan. Naan has a cold. I’ve never been more pissed at a bunch of virions in my life because this means that in due course both Saag, LS and myself shall all fall sway and the only thing worse than two toddlers with a cold is having a verified man-cold situation while working full time. At thirty five weeks. Full time working pregnant women with three whiny patients at home don’t get colds, they just suck it up and run screaming to the safety of work. Lesser of two evils.

Regardless.

I am here and I am more or less well and I now have the perfect out for all the naysayers who think that listening to the urogynaecologists speak their evil words about prolapse and various bits of clever mesh is weak behaviour. BN is, yet again as far as we can tell within the limits of modern guesstimation etc and ad nauseum, very fat, floating way high and I seem to be measuring in the range known as ‘bloody uncomfortable term’ and thus today I got told that should I change my mind in a fit of whimsy, I’d probably just hear the words ‘we really recommend a caesarean’ and if I persisted, possibly a silent ‘you fool, you’re screwing our statistics’.

Not that I am exactly embracing the date with the scalpel since I am trying to put it off for as long as humanly possible, a minor contest of wills that happens at every antenatal visit where I come up with as many new reasons as fifteen minutes permits as to why thirty nine weeks is simply too soon to be strapped down to a table and all cathetered and scalpeled up and my Ob simply smiles serenely and moves on to another subject like turning up in labour because I am a nitwit.

I don’t think she even believed me when I said today that LS is working three hours away that day today and that one, my friends, was true.

Anyway, it is late, I have at least another vomit I need to fit in my crowded social diary before bedtime and, well, the highlight of last week was being extremely tardily referred a woman with a history of short cervix at thirty nine bleeping weeks because the endocrine resident, with breathtaking punctuality and unusual interest in the obstetric management of his patients decided to read the file rather than just fiddle with ze insulin.

I deeply admire the refreshing curiosity if only because it literally made my day to cheerily say ‘love, that’s how they get OUT of there. It’s kind of normal at thirty nine weeks to have a short cervix.’ It wasn’t so great back at twenty four weeks, but hey, we all moved on. Unless you were a trainee endocrinologist, it would seem and you lost what common sense you were born with in a sea of novomix.

Goodnight.

G

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Bad Bhaji

Do excuse the air of haste about the blog, it’s just that I write this brief missive in those golden five seconds known as ‘Dinner in the oven then bolting off to nightshift’. Yes, again.

I have six remaining and then I have six whole glorious weeks where I only have to look at women’s business ends in daylight hours. I can’t tell you how draining this two months of nocturnal nauseated-beyond-belief have been but I maintain that the first trimester is best done in daylight hours, if possible. Vomiting at 3am is just adding insult to oesophageal injury.

Anyway, BN still appears to be in there, although the little bugger did take twenty panicky minutes (after being THIS easy every other damn time, of course) to find on my doppler yesterday. LS also still appears to be whinging intensely about his lot in life.

I think that’s about the status quo around these parts, except for the bit that now LS has come to me with the solemn pronouncement (gleaned after much solemn introspection) that all the HOUSEWORK he is doing is what is holding back his career and thusly he plans not to do any more of that sort of thing and it is now all my problem.

Hold me while I laugh hysterically, please.

Like I said, nothing has changed a jot around these parts and I shall still be scrubbing body fats and very personal hairs off of his shower when I can’t stand the filth any more.

Men.

G

PS. Bad Geohde for forgetting the patient with the third degree tear (the kind of tear sustained when one pushes a watermelon out of a Not Watermelon sized hole and rips allllmost all the way through to a rectal delivery if you know what I mean) had only had a spinal and was awake with working ear holes while humpty dumpty was painstakingly put back together in theatre. Otherwise, when the anaesthetist took an unusual interest in the surgical going’s on and popped down the caboose end for a look, I would have not replied “I had a c-section’ to his equally bad ‘I can’t even work out what I’m looking at here’. Ouch.

I think I might hunt that patient down and tell her all about my wound infection, just to even things out. Ain’t no mess free way to have a baby, really there isn’t.

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Puke.

Dear Internet,

I know the radio <insert slicker modern version of no-longer suitable catchphrase here*> silence MAY make it seem a little bit like I’ve abandoned complaining about my life now that I seem to be knocked up but, really, it’s not the case.

I will always need to complain heavily about my life.

Honest.

It’s mostly the two months of permanent nightshift biting my arse. Oh, and that minor matter of the first trimester fished from about the fourth circle of hell because, honestly, I did NOT sign up for the bit where I get to see my meals in bleeping reverse at least several times a day. Really, I didn’t. They weren’t even that good the first time.

I’ve done the entire first trimester in it’s entirety twice before without any such green-faced issues and so I think I am entitled to bitch about just how horrible I feel. I know I paid rather a lot of good money and loitered in the vicinity of a lot of transfer catheters and generally really ASKED to feel completely shit, but I still maintain that I am not a masochist. I (usually and with exceptions on a pissy 16 dpo beta of bloody one hundred for crying out loud it would seem) Don’t Do first trimester Yurk.

Except when I do.

It’s a good thing IVF taught me a thing or two about shoving needles in my own arse because that my friends is how I am even turning up to work at all these days. The only times that I feel even vaguely like I am not in the middle of a particularly violent spin cycle are when I very first wake up BEFORE I move and that half a second of intestinal bliss about halfway through a serving of piping hot chips BEFORE I make the fatal mistake of eating that one too many.

Basically, in case I have failed to be entirely clear, I feel like shit all the time. Rapidly weight gaining shit, even with the tidal nutrition problem. Thank you, hot chips. They’re about the only thing that sticks.

I also didn’t sign up for the bit where I find it hard to be in the vertical position for more than about two farking hours a day on accounts of insane need for sleep because I am just too busy for that sort of shit right now. Ask my seventy hour working week. The flow-on-no-time laundry deficit at home is getting so severe I have the best part of the last fortnight still laid out on the loungeroom floor and am now merely treating it as an all-you-can-wear buffet with regards to clean underwear and socks in the evenings (life is backwards on permanent nightshit).

I would adore telling my employer to get me the hell off of nightshift and exactly halve my hours while they are at it, apart from the bit where I can’t actually tell them I am pregnant and vomiting into the toilets between suturing shredded undercarriages (post baby ejection thereof) because I am bang in the middle of applying for jobs.

Whatever your local anti-discrimination mafia may tell you, the pregnant chick usually comes about fiftieth, not first.

Sigh.

G

PS. I really should mention the bit where I had another scan and at nine weeks Bhaji Nightshift still seems to be all alive and stuff but hearing LS sigh heavily with disappointment and hang up the phone when I told HIM kind of spoiled the hell out of that ray of sunshine for the time being. He’s being a bit of an arsehole, really.

*ethernet unplugging? Modem dysregulation?

**Knocked in the mastercard? In a Delicate Stirrup? I’m never very good at this sort of thing.

Wrong.

Do excuse me, won’t you, but I interrupt this fog of work related life consumption to shout out to you all that I am actually still alive.

Just.

Enough to mention that the famed corkscrew butt apple was a, wait, really-I-am-not-pulling-your-chain-you’ll-laugh,

…….Granny Smith.

Is it just me that this information strikes as so very wrong on far too many Freudian levels?

Regardless, even in the presence of nobody listening to me blather on about life on accounts of I never type much of import anymore and when I DO say something I am no longer really discussing the state of my marriage on accounts of that THAT has been moaned about up, down and sideways, I did have one other thing to say. About my marriage.

It’s quite simple.

I am not ready to give up and move on, even if I can barely restrain the urge to knock Long Suffering down and gag the man with a custom made arrangement of his sweaty, discarded, UNWASHED socks. Okay, yes, with a chaser of retrieved mirror toothpaste splatter custom edition eye-rub.

I don’t like this situation but what I really don’t like is that when, for random example, a male acquaintance I barely know from the proverbial hole in the ground gets a little too familiar and starts talking about catching up over a bottle of wine.

I’m guessing that wine is what they call casual sex these days and well, ugh. 

THAT just creeps me right on out. It’s not even flattering.

It just feels wrong.

It’s wrong down to my marrow and I don’t want to go down that particular road, not one bit.

So, wise Internet, what do I DO to sort this silly shit I am married to right OUT and actually have a chance at Project Bhaji before I hit menopause? Without killing anybody?

PS. Today I took on the Giant Non-Wage Paying Arsehole of 2010 and you’ll never guess who is getting ALL of her bazillion unrostered bonus hours paid in dirty, hard cash?

Yep, ME, the girl who asked flat out and as we speak has probably lost nearly every job opportunity in my local surgical community and doesn’t really give a shit.

Sometimes I think the secret to doing well in life is to stop giving a damn what other people think.

I may be some time.

Do Excuse me, Internet, for a brief while. Please do not attempt to dissuade me as I open this here invisible flap on our collective hypothetical tent and head out into the howling snowstorm.

I May Be Some Time.

You see, Internet, I am about to finish a run of nightshift, go smack bang face-first into a 14 hour DAY covershift, and then do, I dunno, something ridiculous like a billion hours at work in the next seven days. I may be exaggerating slightly with regards to the ‘billion’ bit, but not by very much.

I’m in the triple digit score range for the week, I think. I’m too tired to add it all up properly.

If only I were playing cricket, it would all sound so much more damn well JOLLY.

Long Suffering isn’t going to be much better off, he’s on call every night this week and so I guess that our collective 3am’s shall be repeatedly shattered by women who inconveniently go into labour in the middle of the night and want an epidural. NOW.

Not that that’s unreasonable, as such, because as I recall I was incredibly attached to the idea of an epidural and I only got a couple of hours of the Labour Lite experience. It just sucks for us.

Also, I really want to know why he’s texting some stranger asking what size clothes they wear, but I can’t ask any more on the grounds that I look like a Paranoid Freak who is Snooping Around, again.

I mean, I AM, but what good will it do?

He’s actually been quite lovely in person lately and I just have to figure out how trusting goes, I suppose.

Now, if you shall excuse me, Naan is running a 40 degree C/104 F temperature and has gone all worryingly floppy and compliant. Naan is NEVER floppy, let alone compliant. She’s notorious for that.

I think if I had a crystal ball, my immediate future is going to involve large amounts of vomit down my front. Shortly. Or possibly a delightful febrile convulsion. Unfortunately all the diaz.epam is kept at work. That place I am not at the moment because I’m meant to be sleeping.

Ha. Hold me while I laugh.

I better not feed her anything that stains, I suppose.

See you all on the flip side.

G

Rose Tinted.

Honestly.

In case you wondered, THIS is yet again another complaining post about Long Suffering, otherwise known as the man who shall provide a steady stream of blog fodder until I am ninety and too demented to write.

Unless I strangle him first, of course.

You will be glad to note that this post is merely a semi-tolerant rant about the silly things that those creatures possessing Y chromosomes do and not a rant about how I mentally used every single item in my knife drawer (yes including the corkscrew) in both natural and artificially generated orifices.

Ahem.

A change is as good as a holiday, you know.

Anyway, although I accept that being optimistic is probably better than my approach of expecting the worst and being occasionally pleasantly surprised when the shit has failed to hit the metaphorical fan, there is a limit. Really, there is. There’s a positive outlook on life, and then there’s being so very far out on a  limb that one is in danger of running out of damn TREE.

I am about to attempt to have a daylight kip before I head off to enjoy the nocturnal wonders of nightshi(f)t yet again, but do bear with me and I shall get to what I am bashing on about. Oh, and if you’d rather bail, please choose an emergency exit aisle seat. Now.

Basically, LS was planning to ‘help’ me sleep in this morning because I am due to be up all bloody night working. I am sorry to abuse innocent punctuation in that sentence, but he didn’t exactly ‘help’.

Oops, just had a Britney Moment there and did it again.

Regardless, if you have to SHAKE awake your spouse to get up and deal with the cranky midget (and her sister) when she has detected three photons at sparrow’s fart am, well, your sleep in is off to a bad start since you are now what is colloquially known as AWAKE.

Additionally, if said suicidal spouse puts on the TV at defcon ten, you really aren’t going to get BACK to sleep, are you? Even if the male in question is bewildered at the banshee shriek of TURN IT BLOODY OFF from the bedroom, hurridly claims it was white noise and covers his groin protectively with both hands.

You know, white noise to cancel out all the yelling.

Finally, it is absolutely optimism of the finest degree to then leave aforementioned Indian Takeaways happily mashing porridge into their hair in order to return to the bedroom and begin hopefully grabbing some bum cheek. Since I appear to be Not Sleeping.

Perhaps I should tell him that I find being well rested in a clean house with the laundry done INCREDIBLY sexy or something because that was bloody ridiculous.

Oh, for sweet f*cks sake.

Dear Long Suffering,

I just thought I’d passively-aggressively let you know that should you wish to LIVE that any further attempts to drag me out of bed at 3 fucking am to ‘deal’ with Naan when YOU are not working in the morning and I am shall probably lead to manual disembowelment.

With a blunt spoon.

You lazy bastard,

Love,

Your very tired wife who just worked a 12 hour shift which ended on a new-and-irritiating low note of copping a face full of angry spittle secondary to stupid rant by some borderline personality disordered crazy bint who thought that if she turned up to ED we would all magically open the gates of heaven and she would be entitled to an admission, just so’s she could see the five specialty outpatient appointments that SHE decided not to rock up to in the last month.

Also, alopecia and bruised shins and being stoned are not classed as medical emergencies as such and I work in an EMERGENCY department, you see. I am entirely happy to let my departing back receive the rest of your rant about how when you are found DEAD in your bed tomorrow morning (presumably from terminal hair loss) it shall all be MY fault.

At least it will save you dealing with child services for that time you took GHB and decided to stop breathing in the back of an ambulance while your five year old child slept alone at home.

Don’t worry, I don’t think I’ll lose much sleep about the fact you think I’m a crap doctor. The ones you LIKE give you an elephant-stopping daily dose of xan.ax. Possibly to shut you up.

Teething Troubles

…and for once, it’s NOT Saag or Naan, it’s me.

A few weeks ago I noticed that just one side of the very furthest, darkest (most inconveniently inaccessible with tongue, finger or just about bloody anything) part of my very small and terminally full of teeth ALREADY jaw was a bit sore.

After an invigorating contortionist-like  thirty minutes trying to look at the area of concern with the aid of a torch and mirror I concluded there’s a REASON we pay dentists to do that sort of thing. Besides the mirror kept getting all foggy JUST when I had the torch lined up correctly.

Some further borderline jaw-unhinging and digital exploration seemed to tell me, however, that there was a tiny piece of what I can only assume was a blasted tooth poking up behind my last molar. Damn thing had only taken thirty something years to fight it’s way out, but there it was in it’s belated glory.

All one corner. I mean, what’s the bloody point of that?

I figured there was no way that any more of it could emerge and decided to let partially erupted dogs lie if and until they went and developed holes in them or something. After all:

A: It’s really fecking hard to go to the dentist with twins in tow. My ‘No!’ of authority is seriously eroded by having somebody’s hands in my mouth, even without adding in the fun of the whole wrenching a tooth from it’s socket business. Also, there’s enough dribble in my household as it is without me having half my face numb and adding to the wet carpet factor.

B: The other three ironically named wisdom teeth have clearly got the wrong map with regards to the way out and/or are so crammed up in jawbone that they aren’t going anywhere ever, I hope. I think I’ve got those buggers on lockdown, and I do not want to test this theory by removing only ONE only to find that the rest of them emerge one-by-one over the next ten years.

Regardless of all of this and somehow in a tardis-like feat, the inside of my gob must be bigger than it seems from the OUTSIDE because now the rest of the bloody tooth in question is coming through and I am too old to get away with yelling at people about it.

Unlike Naan.

Also, in completely unrelated matters, LS is getting in my tits even more than usual and quite frankly if it wasn’t for the fact that I am going to miss the Indian Takeaways like crazy, going back to work tomorrow for the next fifty million nightshifts is looking like a really attractive proposition. Otherwise my HEAD is in serious danger of exploding the next time he says something retarded.

Not only is he irritating the shite out of me, but it’s pretty clear that he has absolutely no intention of actually ever doing something constructive towards having another baby (in the same way he is completely incapable of booking the car in for a service, doing a load of laundry or emptying the dishwasher). Quite frankly in retrospect I am amazed he was ever organised enough to turn up and ejaculate into a cup on time to generate Saag and Naan.

Basically I’m utterly stuffed and need to give up on THAT idea. I’m just going to be too bloody old at this rate  (whatever happens with our relationship, a whole another load of misery entirely) and I don’t even have the free time to turn up to the clinic within business hours, anyway. 

This reproductive death by a thousand cuts  really freaking stings the most of all right now.

I didn’t want to be an all-domestic, all-painting, all-cooking, all-cleaning, husband-resenting, stuntwoman-length shift-working multitasking sad mess. I never wanted that. I wanted to be a mother.

Why does it have to be so hard?

Chromo.

Dear ladies, gents and other collective people of the Internet I have inadvertently pissed-off by failing to include you with my first two overly traditionally and assumption-laden titles of address.

I work in emergency medicine and I am learning the hard way that just because your name says ‘Bruce’ on the labels I get given, it doesn’t mean that you drive a truck clad in a grotty white singlet, shorts, and sporting that dishevelled unshaven look. Actually, sometimes you DO, but also you like coming in to hospital when something goes wrong in your bottom for reasons I think should remain forever unexplained due to Delicacy.

Anyway.

Although I am technically on ‘holiday’ right now from job 1.0, this merely means that I am working hard at paid job 2.0 and also trying to kick ass at unpaid job 3.0 (children), job 4.0 (getting the laundry load down to ONE basket of trade deficit) and job 5.0 (housepainting and Moving Heavy Things While Grunting a lot).

Which kind of brings me to my point.

I mean, LS is not the world’s MANLIEST man, not by a long shot, but when your wife says the following:

…….. ’right after I paint these walls, sand this do-jiggy, restain it and assemble this here BBQ (with side visit to plumbing supplier to get requisite jets for wall gas supply) I’d quite like it if you would watch the kids so I can take delivery of this incredibly heavy piece of furniture so’s I can lug it into place and assemble it in peace. Oh, and THEN I plan to check the air in the car tyres and pop the bonnet to see if I can find out what is making that godawful rattle on the freeway’…

Well, damnit, but if your Y chromosome is working beyond mere growing of facial hair, testicle scratching, sports watching, chick ogling and the like then you should fucking well at least offer to give me a happy ending afterwards in rewards for all my efforts. In high heels and short skirt please. With dinner.

Actually, scratch that. I’m confusing MYSELF on this one now. I’ve been busy.

Schmalentines Day.

Maybe I’m just a little jaded.

Please don’t judge me, but I think the very best way to spend Valentines day is not curled up on a picnic blanket somewhere not-as-private-as-it-should-be lovingly conquering several bases and co-incidentally catching mosquito bites in tricky places.

I’m a fairly straight-down-the-line kind of girl, but that does not mean I cut to the chase and rate item ‘shag like rabbits’ all that highly, either. That’s for the single folk, the newly-in-love and, you know, young people.

I haven’t been any of those in some years now.

I don’t have a specific problem with sex as such, really I don’t,  I’m actually kind of fond of it. Inbuilt contraception helps, although I am actually kind of fond of the idea of more little people, too. Most especially free ones that I can create in a DIY fashion (with some Y chromosome assistance, clearly) at home. I mean, I’m no bike or anything, but I’ve been around long enough to get that one right without having to resort to a ‘insert tab A into slot B (and repeat, and repeat, and repeat)’ type instruction manual in some language I don’t understand, although I bet some of the more helpful diagrams would be rather unintentionally hilarious.

I digress, but just look at all the po.rn out there. Mostly I just about widdle myself laughing at po.rn right AFTER I finish wincing in sympathy with the cervixes(?ii) of the recipients. I mean I KNOW they’re paid for measurements other than their acting skills, but they really don’t look much like they’re having fun to me. No wonder teenage boys get it all so comically wrong.

Anyway, coming back to my I Didn’t Get Anything, Not Even Slightly Second Hand Flowers point, if I may.

It’s just that given the choice between getting sweaty (an event I correspond with item ‘exercise’) for The Corny Stuffed Bear Cause OR, say, eating a block of chocolate, a tub of icecream and half a bottle of red wine ON MY OWN, well, bring on the spoon.

Yes, so my nose may be just a tiny bit out of joint right now. What of it?

Tiresome.

Internet, I did it again. I peeked.

I couldn’t help it, Internet! LS was down the front of the house happily absorbed playing global warming sceptic on his computer and his mobile phone was positively crooning my name from a safe distance away riiiiight down the back on it’s charger.

‘Geoooohde’ it said, ‘You KNOW I am chock full of The Juicy.’

‘No!’, said I. ‘I Will Be Good and Not Snoop. I am REFORMED’.

‘Ha!’ said the phone, and unable to stand it’s mocking any more I assaulted it’s keypad lock and had a lightening-quick lookey-loo in ye old inbox.

I must say even though I expected some interesting reading on accounts of apparently LS doesn’t bother deleting the more, um, flavoursome texts from Best Mate, I WAS a tad shocked to find a reference to a boring financial article along with the happy tag ‘If you’re having trouble [redacted] while having [redacted] with your s.exless wife, read THIS for to pop your [redacteds]‘.

You know what, Internet?

THAT was the final straw.

Yes, there were also more messages from the (becoming predictably dull) mysterious interstate [redacted] who still  seems to want to know all about our relationship and how we are getting along, especially with regards to any unclean laundry we may have with an oh-so-sympathetic-call-me-ear, but I’m assuming that is simply a Very Safely Far Away lass with a crush that isn’t going to get any chance at action unless my corspe is cooling first.

I can cope with that sort of shit.

But Best Mate has absolutely no right on this planet to refer to me in such downright derogatory terms behind my back. None at all. Not only was it bang out of line, but weirdly enough it also isn’t even true. It’s hard to have sex when you’re either working nightshit shift, or finishing after midnight and your partner is holding the daytime fort.

We sleep in series and not in parallel at the moment, if you get my drift.

So if LS was, as I must assume, whinging about losing a battle in the Shagging Olympics to his single Best Mate, it’s hardly my fault.

I know I shouldn’t have been snooping, and totally got what I deserved but I was downright hurt to the core that  Best Mate could casually refer to me in such nasty terms.

So, THIS time I actually told LS so. In person. Armed with aforementioned scarlet text.

Let’s just say the rest of the day here has been interesting and full of abject apologies on behalf of Best Mate.

I’ve made it clear that ‘sorry’ won’t be good enough this time. Best Mate is no longer welcome. Not in my house.

Screwy

Oh wise Internet,

Forgive me for I have pillow talked. With LS. About, you know, siblings.

Okay, before you all freak out on the plural note I will disclaim that highly preferably I am seeking probably only one more FULL TERM uterine tenant and only one at a time and all of that jazz. I’m not completely mental.

It’s just that I’m getting near to that cheerful old chestnut so unkindly termed ‘advanced maternal age’ and my clucker is getting pretty damn, well, clucky. I reckon I’ve maybe got one more shot at a live birth in me and I wouldn’t mind a do over. The first two times I was pregnant each sucked deeply in their own special way, so I don’t really know why I think I would enjoy a third repetition, but just humour me here.

I’d like the P3.0 experience even if it is just to remind me how much I hated trying to GET, STAY and actually BEING pregnant. I do not like being pregnant, remember? I spent, what was it, um, something like a total of 49 weeks pregnant in a year and a half, so I am moderately well qualified on that point. So is my deflated arse.

You would think that infertility, the whole lethal birth defect thing, three IVF transfers and a complicated twin pregnancy followed by the newborn experience from refluxy-milk-vomit-stained hell would have broken my damn clucker for GOOD (Thank you Eden, I shall nick your most excellent turn of phrase there).

I must have a bleeping shatter-proof cluck-muscle or I wouldn’t have had two glasses of wine and bleated on-and-on at 9pm about the whole thing to my spouse last night. Please don’t snicker at the time. I am in bed by 9pm, sooner if I can manage it. I am farking tired all the time. It’s like death and taxes.

For all my moaning about how tired I am, I quite like my children, thank-you-very-much and I am open to the concept of finding out if I could become quite fond of a third one.

I guess where it gets complicated and all goes to shit a bit is when you recall that LS and I aren’t precisely getting along all that well these days. The thought of having you-know-what with somebody I can  barely hold a conversation with without wanting to disembowel them with a blunt spoon is a little startling.

Actually, it’s not even about the intermittent sex, because clearly that is never going to work anyway, but more about the hip-pocket hit of more IVF.

To wind this essay up (I can sense eyes glazing over in front of monitors), it turns out that LS also has an overactive clucker gland. His take on the mess is suitably male.

He tells me, and I ALMOST cannot fault his logic, that since I am probably his last fairly sure bet at offspring perhaps we should have another metaphorical crack at it. Soon.

….although he does forget that there is a whole planet of women biologically driven to find blokes with job status and maturity a bit of a panty-dropper whereas the market for older saggy multiparous women is a lot less competitive…

However.

You know something in your relationship ain’t quite right when your dear spouse then asks if we could live in separate households afterwards.

Actually, that might not be such a bad idea, I think we’d get along rather better if I didn’t know how bloody terrible he is at cleaning out the toilet bowl. Nothing says ‘marriage’ like finding sprayed up poop under the rim and all pee down the front now, does it?

Edited to add: this hardly counts as a formal back-in-the-saddle announcement since we’ve never bothered spending the money on contraception, does it? I mean TECHNICALLY (okay, don’t snigger) I could have belted out I’M PREGNANT at any time in the last year and a half right? Okay, yes, unlikely. Perhaps it’s more of a reconsideration in the direction of flashing my goods for strangers with transfer catheters again. LS wasn’t there when the twins were unceremoniously and with eye-watering speculum technique returned to sender and decided to hang around, so I guess I can be a big girl and turn up again even if I do have a terminally tactless spouse.

Turning over a new leaf.

For about the billionth time.

Okay, as a person who comprehensively sucks at giving significant holidays their due respect and has been known to completely forget that the date after December 31 happens to be January one THE NEXT YEAR, well, you’re on incredibly safe ground if you guessed I didn’t do much last night in the way of celebration.

After all, it has not escaped my memory that being as it is Jan 1 now (even if I’ll in all probability get the name of the year wrong until about March or so), a deadline has been passed. I’d quote Douglas Adams at this point, but the whooshing sound was actually kind of distressing in light of events I shall outline further below.

To be blunt, I’m not especially sure what marital status I shall have to go with my mind like a leaky colander when it comes to orientation in time by the point I work out what year it is and write it down all reliably properly like on forms.

I may be terminally vague, but I am damn sure that recently enough a certain threat was made with regards to a certain relationship if certain things did not improve by ‘next year’.

Guess what? Next year, nice to meet you. No discernible improvement THIS end.

We seemed to be getting on fairly well yesterday, although I have to confess that these days ‘fairly well’ means that I haven’t mentally wanted to disembowel a certain somebody with contents of the knife drawer after I’ve rearranged their oral anatomy such that they’re brushing teeth trans-rectally by necessity.

It’s not great round these parts but when you have two children together and a lot of debt it’s not like upping and leaving your high-school boyfriend for someone hotter that you met at the bus stop. It’s a much bigger call than that. Besides, there’s no one, hot or otherwise and I don’t think the dating market is precisely flooded with men looking for saggy-gutted bony-assed women with multiple kids, a masculine haircut and ever-present debt.

Anyway, I spent last night happily wrapped up in my duvet by an earth-shatteringly dull 9pm. Okay, I might have been a bit piddled, but ’tis the season.

LS, on the other hand, set todays events in motion with some truly unnerving aim. He managed to knock a full glass of red wine right down a white painted wall, and in typical domestically clueless fashion just rubbed at the surface of the stain a bit with a tea-towel and then toddled off to bed, leaving it to marinade overnight.

Accordingly THIS morning, I woke up to my new future in loungeroom decor- a big, fat, ruby coloured mess soaked indelibly into the paint smack-bang on the only vacant wall in the room.

To say the mood has been tense since that clanger of an introduction to 2010 would be missing the opportunity to ask if I can gain employment as a bomb disarmament specialist just for the chance to relax a bit.

The words ‘separate’ and ‘divorce’ have been getting a bit of an airing again.

Is it just me that is finding all of this exhausting more than anything else?

Happy new year.

PS. At the good Shannon’s polite prompting, I have updated my blogroll after an inexcusably long hiatus. If your name isn’t on it and you would like me to rectify the matter, do nag me in the comments section. Just don’t threaten divorce, because the way I’m feeling right now I might just say ‘what the heck’ to that one.

Also, if you lurk, say ‘hi’?

Just for me? I could really bloody do with the positive news I still have readers and all that ‘ooh, stuff in my INBOX!’ jazz.

Why DO you read, anyways? Should I be whining more or less about the following items A: infertility B: no sex, C: marriage status updates (suck it facebook), D: twins, E: crazy thoughts of child number three in this untidy situation, F: even crazier thoughts of an FET since intermittent shagging has now failed for 17 months (okay, only about six periods) and counting?

Just wondering.

Repost.

Or, possibly riposte?

Yes, I know it’s lazy of me to ‘borrow’ and recycle the post I wrote for the cross-pollination effort a while back.

Yes, you may tell me I cannot have ice-cream for dessert today, and I shall not argue or whine too much about it. Mostly because I am officially the fattest a chicken-legged stick insect can get right now and in the only slightly-unfortunately-cushingoid place I really gain weight, to boot, my abdomen.

I am a striae ravaged olive on a damn stick. Okay, two sticks.

To abuse some more food analogies since I have started in that theme, nothing says ‘sexy’ like having a beer gut right underneath your saggy fried eggs. 

I think I’m hungry.

Anyway.

I am most pissed about it (although you will note NOT pissed enough to refrain from filling my cake hole as frequently as is my wont) and things are looking increasingly grim for the strangers who will probably start rubbing my belly in the supermarket any day now.

However, it is coming up to Christmas, my cupboard is positively bulging with an orgy of food which I plan to unleash on my unwary extended family in one big, indulgent, sugar and fat laden (to disguise the fact that I can arrange food quite well and my presentation is positively impeccable, but regrettably I cannot actually cook as such) feast in, eep-must-buy-sharding-presents, less than a week now.

Feck it, waists are overrated, yes?

Anyway, without further ado, here is my old-is-the-new-NEW post. Please don’t hate me too much for being so slack. If it helps I also have a driver’s licence photo to endure, a dental visit overdue and I need to get a quote for home insurance. I am already suffering enough.

Boobs. They’re not always just for men’s magazines, after all.

Today I am positively itching to share a fact.

It turns out that breasts also make this stuff called milk.

Okay, so mostly. In an ideal world, they’d all swap from ‘Ralph front-page cleavage with big blue veins on’ to ‘moo’ the very moment we gave birth, but in the real world it doesn’t always go quite like that.

We all know that ‘breast is best’. We all hear the mantra. Almost every single one of us who is fortunate enough to become a parent, especially after infertility wants their body to do SOMETHING right. For many of us, our cans co-operate.

But that isn’t the end of the story.

Breastfeeding rates don’t lie. While 90ish percent leave hospital ‘breastfeeding’ (a fact I question in these heady days of discharging women before milk has even come in), by the time a baby is six months old it’s less than half.

So what happens? Why aren’t we all blissfully gazing into a happy baby’s nuzzling face while our perfectly un-bleeding nipples produce the goods?

Are so many of us lazy? Bad mothers?

I would disagree.

It is true that some of us just can’t, and even the most militant Booby types concede that number is about one in twenty. I had the dubious honour of becoming one of that number.

But again, the rates say it all. Plenty more of us stop and I refuse to believe it’s because we’re all lazy cows who want their tits back in something that doesn’t unfasten itself in the supermarket and show your breast pad to half of the queue in front of you before you correct the problem.

If you’re reading this and you had an easy transition to breastfeeding, you don’t know how lucky you are. It’s so loaded emotionally and hard for us flunkers to discuss with you.

Society is on your side.

Put simply, usually it doesn’t come easy. It’s NOT natural or instinctive. Often, it’s damn hard at best. Even worse, many of us have never seen it done before we’re expected to know all about a ‘good latch’, or a ‘football hold’ by simple virtue of creating life. Breastfeeding isn’t something we talk about in more than vague generalities and so it’s no wonder that so many women aren’t aware the baby ISN’T meant to chomp down on the nipple until you’re cracked and bleeding.

All of that aside, all of us do the best we can for our babies and we damn well try. But at the end of the day when your nipples are bleeding, you’ve got mastitis AGAIN, you’re borderline bleeping psychotic after four weeks on two hours sleep because you can’t let down for the pump to get a break and you think you might want to throw your baby rather than let them take to your sensitive bits with their oral cheesegrater in two hours time, sometimes enough is enough.

And that’s okay. Really, it’s understandable. You are not bad, evil or a failure.

Let’s be honest. Really honest. No matter what anybody says about muss, fuss and equipment, bottle feeding has its place.

And sometimes, do forgive me boob-police for uttering these words, that’s not such a sin.

There, I said it.

It’s not so evil to bottle feed if you have to.

Yes, there are exceptions, and YES, breast is the best if you can, but if your kid has asthma in ten years time and you bottle fed, it doesn’t mean you should flagellate your tits for failing you. They probably would have got it anyway, and life isn’t so black and white as the papers would have you believe.

So.

This one goes out to all the flunkers, failures, thrushers, mastitisers, bleeders, biters and plain old exhausteders who want to reclaim ownership of their nipples. This one’s for you.

It’s okay that you stopped.

You tried. End of story.

Don’t beat yourself up about it any more than you have already. Don’t feel you can’t mention your mode of feeding in public for fear of judgement.

Remember.

It isn’t any of their damn business.

Conversely, if you’re one of the fortunate enough to be able to breastfeed and do it well, talk to a sister who could use the tips. demystify. Explain.

HELP. There are plenty of women who could use it.

But.

Don’t be an ass, either. Plenty of us make the mistake that simple information means everything will work- I have degrees that taught me clever things about prolactin, lactiferous ducts and oxytocin. I could bore for my nation on lactation (when I’m not spending my time merely rhyming badly). My boobs didn’t get the memo.

Just understand that you were one of the lucky ones. Be gentle.

And remember, the next time you see a woman using the dreaded formula-word, any negative comment you might have, no matter how pointed, well there isn’t a damn thing you could say to her that that woman probably hasn’t said to herself already.

You can’t make her feel any worse than she already does.

Every mother does the best she can for her children with the resources she had at the time. End of debate.

Peace out, world.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Perhaps next time I shall share my lightbulb moment male training approach to sharing the load of boring household chores more evenly. Hint, men think something else is better than chocolate and will go to some impressive lengths to get it.

Rhymes with ‘witch’.

<confession>

Forgive me, Internet, for I have sinned.

I have willfully and without regard used a certain social networking tool to look up a certain male person from my past life.

Please forgive me, but I was curious.

Damnit, I wanted to know. He may have been a one-off in-sobriety regretted spectacularly bad shag, but oh boy he was cute. Charming. Vaguely debonair, even if I could see clean over the top of his head in heels and he persisted in fiddling with the shift of an automatic car like it was a requisite part of the driving.

Drowningly big brown eyes, as I recall. With accent you understand.

You could just about get a season pass to my fun zone with the right accent and a glass of wine back in the day.

Actually, in retrospect he was probably merely an affected little snit who was borrowing a mate’s fondue pot to look all suave, but what does a twenty year old know of such things? 

So, dear sweet Internet who hopefully shall not judge me overmuch for what I am about to say, is it wrong that I looked him up, worked out who his wife is, looked at HER profile and thought to myself smugly ‘at least I don’t have to chew my own arm off in the mornings?’

I have sinned.

</end confession>

Little things.

I spent this morning cleaning.

Actually, since the above sentence makes it sound like I’ve gone all 50′s housewife and shall duly invite you all over for a dinner consisting of three courses, none of which I’ve fucked up in any way and at least one of which nessecitates competant use of my oven, I shall begin again.

I spent this morning scrubbing clean every damn millimetre of grout between every single tile in my entire house with the aid of something that has a cleaning action best described as somewhere between ‘paint stripper’ and ‘partial thickness burns’. With a toothbrush. Slowly.

Because that seems to be how I roll when I am under pressure.

Don’t worry, although I admit I was tempted, I used an old toothbrush and not one of LS’s.

Also, on the plus side and trying to see the silver lining in the fact that the skin on my hands is now so very dessicated that touching things sets my teeth on edge, if I do turn into the kind of apron-sprouting woman who knows how long to cook a roast without risking serving guests either meat so rare that a rapid combination of CPR and defibrillation may restore circulation to the departed beast in question, or alternately and more irretrievably a round lump of smoking charcoal…..well.

If I discover a hitherto deeply hidden talent with hair rollers and turn into one of those women who don’t drink their alcohol out of tumblers merely because the proper wine glasses are an utter bastard to fit in the dishwasher, and you do all come over to admire my table settings, I guess you better squeeze in a compliment on my grout as well.

No, that’s not an euphamism for anything, either.

Things are strange around these parts, and I’m not sure how best to describe the state of play.

LS and I talk perfectly civilly to one another. Mostly. I keep the swearing to under my breath.

I still want to rip his silly head off barehanded and slap him with the wet end when he admonishes one of the twins not to walk on the tiles lest they fall, hit their head and die.

We cuddle in bed before going to sleep at night. He still generally ruins the fragile peace by telling me I really need to shape up and work on the things that displease him.

I barely resist the urge to shove his head clean up his own bottom just so he can’t say any more stupid things. Mostly because he does try to say them nicely, I think.

In paranoid mode, I check his old text messages and read such pearlers as one from his best mate recommending he slip me a drug touted as a surefire way to have a wife in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom. Obviously he’s not been completely straight with best mate about the underpinnings of the sex drought around these parts.

Oh, and then there’s all the ones from someone interstate who I do not know in the least, but who sure seems to want to know how some of LS’s ‘talks’ with myself have gone down. They also seem to be of the  ’miss you’, ‘thinking of you’ and ‘wish you could be here’ persuasion when it comes to my husband.

With x’s.

Clearly I cannot interrogate LS on the matter since they were never mine to read in the first instance and I shall only come off as an untrusting nutbag if I let on I know. Besides, I have bigger things to worry about than some harlot who in all probability exists only in my worried mind and conveniently a very safe distance away.

I’m trying. He’s trying. We shall see.

He is the man who wept and roared with grief when we found out our first baby would invariably die.

If I close my eyes I can still see him rocking Saag and Naan not long after they were born, telling them how very glad he was to meet them at long last.

It’s hard, sweating the little things when I know the frame of the big picture is quite different. Now, if only I can hold onto that thought.

Not Okay.

This is a post that I need to preface with a heavy sigh and a ‘what now?’

I’ve not been writing as much as is my wont of late. I could blame the twins, work, life and a sudden deep and time-consuming obsession with handwashing every single item of laundry individually in a misdirected attempt to get the dribble stains out, but it wouldn’t be true.

I could even tell you a funny story about how LS has, rather inappropriately, taught Naan to grab her euphemistic moneymaker when he says the magic word ‘flaps!’, but I don’t really feel like it.

I could tell you how Saag has taken a carpet-risking fancy to removing her own nappy and belting around the house at warp speed stark naked, collapsing in a foot stomping hissy-fit at all the Oppression By The (Wo)Man when I insist that babies to whom ’potty training’ is merely a nice collection of syllables must keep their leaky bits covered, thank-you-very-much. But I don’t want to do that either.

I could write this under password, but for now I won’t. Mostly because I am not really writing anything here that LS and I have not bashed out in person without any sensible resolution already. However, I will probably rethink the decision not to pwp at some sleepless 3am in the near future and change that in a blind panic.

More heavy sighing, please. You know there’s been a lot of friction Chez MII.

Here’s the thing.

We’re not okay.

We’re really not okay.

I could also write a big, hurt missive about all the banal and predictable things that make us so not okay, but I expect that you could guess most of them, anyway. Disputes about laughable complete ignorance of magically self maintaining house, unfair division of time, money, the fact that LS wouldn’t even know which energy companies we’re signed up with, let alone how to pay a sodding bill, work (I mean, the man independently got me a job six hours away by plane when the twins were three months old on the grounds that it would be ‘good’ for my career and was surprised when I declined), sleeping arrangements and the general whinges and whines of a card-carrying pissed off housewife.

See, predictable.

Oh, and then there’s his (what I maintain is about as non-normative as heading out in public clothed only in your socks) rabid anxiety about everything that pertains to Saag and Naan. I don’t know another parent who hovers so bleeping much and won’t even let their children walk on the tiles lest they fall over, bang their heads and die, but I live with this sort of thing.

Every. Single. Day.

It’s exhausting, and I admit I’m pathetically human. Having my buttons pushed so effectively all the time makes me cranky, snappy and judgemental. I suck. I admit it.

But.

I’m not the one who seems to think that the easy out is the way to go. I may not like LS very much a lot of the time at the moment, but we have history together and I love him. We made vows.

In summary, and to get to the point, I am not at all sure that he plans to keep them. Not anymore. Because last night he matter of factly gave me (and therefore US) until the end of the year to shape up before one of us had to leave.

The thing that really gets my goat is he objected to calling this a threat. I’m not sure what else you would call it, really.

More sighing.

Having multiples puts the kind of stress test on a relationship that all too many fail. The statistics bear that out. I simply don’t know whether being naughty or nice will change what I get for Christmas this year.

PS. In Keeping It Together mode, because there are still a few bloggers who have not replied to my sing-out, I must ask all of you who signed up to the great blog cross-pollination this year who haven’t checked your email lately, or haven’t received an email from me acknowledging your entry to check your email. Send me a line if you haven’t got one, or you haven’t replied as yet and you’d make me abjectly grateful.

I’m good at abject gratitude.

Only a man…

May I utter the universal cry of truly browned-off women everywhere?

Men!

Humph.

Bloody silly creatures they are, really.

Honestly, I  actually happen to love LS, despite my many written allusions to possible acts of physical violence upon his person, really I do.

Most of the time, at least.

Even if  he dosen’t have the faintest idea just how it is his underwear drawer never runs out, or that the fridge is always full of food. Let alone a sensible understanding of how to hold a vacuum cleaner the right way up. I think he might do himself an injury if he turned the blasted thing on successfully, so it’s probably a good thing he doesn’t even know which cupboard it lives in.

It must be jolly nice living in a world where the sorting fairy, washing fairy, shopping fairy, cleaning fairy, dusting fairy and diary fairy keep your life neat and tidy all on your behalf behind the scenes like that. Really, it must.

Typing the above paragraph makes me wish I fancied the fairer sex, because surely a two woman household would run MUCH more smoothly.

Just think of all the loo seat  and piddle on the floor palaver I wouldn’t have to deal with.

But, anyway. My weekend point is the following belated observation.

Men come without and not in any way WITH the tact chip in the factory standard model, don’t they?

Because otherwise, I think mine has a broken one.

How else can I explain LS telling me that I am, and I quote ‘moody and grumpy’ before bidding me goodnight to retreat to my decidedly-separate-shall-not-be-poked-all-night bedroom and then being shocked when I tell him to get stuffed?

I mean, really?

What part of calling your spouse a cranky witch in those sort of circumstances doesn’t deserve cutting the crotch out of every single pair of jocks, simply as a warning shot?

I think I was quite restrained in the circumstances.

 

Rant-End-Rant.

Dear Internet,

I am home, I have slept (although see below for further details on that one), I have been blissfully reunited with my mascara, deodarent and (praise-be-to-the-dental-gods) toothbrush, and now I have a question for you.

I do so hope you can help.

So, Internet, oh wise and all-knowing Internet.

Can you tell me something?

Because I really need to know the answer.

At what point in a marriage does a quirky trait in a spouse shift from endearing to more irritating than wearing sandpaper underpants horse riding? 

If I am alone in my dilemma and your own loving spouse never does anything to cause your eyelid to twitch convulsively, just where do I get a Husband 2.0 upgrade from? Should I try reading the user’s manual for the version I have again first?

Can I reboot the sucker?

Or am I simply an uncaring bitch?

Also, how do you make it goddam stop already?

Is electroshock therapy even legal?

Would it really be too juvenile to file for divorce on the grounds that your spouse irritates the living snot out of you?

Because something is REALLY chafing my bum and I am this close to, oh, I don’t know, probably simply fuming impotently between my own ears about how bloody pathetic LS is when it comes to his precious SLEEP, combined with a little gentle week-old-kipper fishwacking of the facial region the very next time he refuses to get his arse out of bed in the morning on accounts of how tired he is.

Like, say, tomorrow.

I can forecast this with complete-and-absolute 100% confidence on accounts of it happens every day. Every. Single. Morning. I get to hear how he is just exhausted and tired and has not slept a WINK all night.

I am possibly a small and petty person, but oh BOY and I fucking sick to the back teeth of hearing that whine.

I am also fornicatingly-unwell to the point of dental caries in my molars with the current status quo of picking up the slack, being almost literally drowned in baby shit solo before midday and making excuse after excuse to the universe at large when people ask about why husband almost never appears in public. Seriously, I have friends that don’t even know what he looks like.

So, what the flipping feck is wrong with LS and why the hell do I always end up the bad guy because I cannot remain forever sympathetic to his dozy plight?

After so many groundhog-day years of this rubbish every damn morning I just have this irresistable urge to kick his lazy arse until he gets it out of bed, is all.

Is that not perfectly understandable?

Send help at once, because I now refuse to even contemplate sleep in the same bedroom on accounts of I cannot take any more bleeping fingers poking me in the arm, chest, back and eyeball at random and all night, nor will I endure repeated nocturnal wake-ups and interrogations as to which position I may or may not be choosing to enjoy my repose.

Also, he turns the fucking light on to check I am telling the truth. If I don’t divorce him I may possibly kill him. With a blunt spoon. Slowly.

Seriously.

Mayday.

Or at least a supply of ready-matured old kippers, please.

Busy.

Dear Internet,

Do please excuse me, for I am busy.

I am busy doing the third lot of vomited-on washing today.

I am busy retrieving half of the first load from my neighbour’s yard where the wind has helpfully blown my knickers into a puddle.

I am busy swearing creatively that I didn’t peg things more securely, while idly wondering just what I should do with the sopping wet second load sitting in the basket.

I am busy placating a cranky (teeth, if I did not already have enough on my plate) Saag and Naan with offers of sultanas, and wondering what I shall do to keep the fragile peace when I run out of them after the next handful.

I am busy writing a list of things that should be in our cupboard and fridge, but mysteriously aren’t, because we ate them and they do not magically replenish themselves no matter how wistfully I hope that one day they shall.

I am busy ignoring all the dirt on the carpets because I do not have time to vacuum today.

I am busy wondering if I can get away with feeding all of us left over prawn crackers for lunch.

Finally, I am busy forcefully restraining myself from manually stranglating LS with one of his old ties (or possibly drowning him by placing him head first in the loo and flushing repeatedly) because he is still in bed at nearly midday and I know when he does finally emerge from his cave of blankets, the first words out of his daft mouth shall be about how very tired he is.

I am a busy woman.

Third child syndrome.

Sometimes I think I have not two on-their-own-a-handful-enough children, but three, really I do.

It’s just that one of them is over six-feet tall and has the general hang of potty training. Unlike Saag or Naan, LS can be trusted on the carpets without a nappy on, although he cannot as yet be trusted to lock the front door at night, close the back door, turn off a light, open his own mail or pay a bill before something critical is disconnected.

I’m hoping he figures those ones out eventually although I do not hold out overmuch hope given he’s nearly forty already. I think LS’s about as grown up as he’s going to get.

In other words, the Man Of The House continues his campaign to convince the entire world that the next step is likely to be a headstone engraved with ‘Told you I was SICK!’ should we all continue to not believe him in his unconvincing protestations of suffering Pestilence Most Foul and not (for contrast) merely crying wolf with a megaphone about a bleeping sniffle.

Perhaps I was just a little mean there. Just a little.

But the great whuss came home from work yesterday, chirpily explaining how he had told everybody how gravely, deathly ill he remained and that he was unlikely to come into work today on accounts of a probable prior engagement with hacking up the left, followed by right, lung. With immediate requirement for an urgent transplant if he were to survive.

Having personally collected enough infant bodily secretions in one day to make my very own snot lake, in both half a box of tissues and also liberally down the front of my shirt and jeans, I had enough. Mostly because the silly big girl’s blouse had a full dinner, followed by two glasses of wine, leisurely watched television and then went to bed, happily convinced he would be bunking off work in the morning and as a bonus extra not watching the Indian Takeaways either.

Oh no you don’t, Sonny Jim.

No coughing, no sneezing, no headache, no snot. None. Not a goober. No paracetamol, no tissues, no red nose, either.

So this morning, positively brimming with the milk of human kindness, I woke him up bright and early and drove him to work. I have to admit I did enjoy it, just a little bit.

I dropped him at the front of the hospital and essentially told the silly sod he probably wouldn’t die, to be a good boy, play nice with the other staff, and I’d come get him before the end of school-time if teacher called.

I think he thinks I’m mean.

Subjectively, after all, he’s this close to picking out a cozy wooden box and settling in for a rather permanenet lie-down.

In which I offend the subcontinental.

Or perhaps Long Suffering, my delicate petal of a spousal unit probably does, at least.

The reason?

As is the norm around these parts, Saag and Naan have generously not only shared one of their perma-colds with each other, but additionally with us.

Predictably enough, this means that LS has decided that he may in fact die of galloping consumption if he is not extremely careful to do nothing but assume the horizontal position, raise a delicate hand to his fragile brow, and generally whine with excessive vowel abuse about how is so very, very, deathly ‘Siiiiiiikkkkhhh’.

Sikkkkkhhh-er than the colleague he had to replace on call the other day because she caught herself an invigorating case of swine flu and scored herself a quiet few days on the receiving end of hospital food. So very Sikhhhhhhh that he had to lie in bed all morning, doing absolutely nothing but moan about what a rough day he was having and how very tired he was.

Honestly, he’s lucky I haven’t gassed him with the nappy pail contents. 

Additionally, quips that he doesn’t have nearly enough hair (or a turban to put it in) to convince anybody he’s switched ethnic groups lately, let alone anything in the melanin deartment, have simply earned me the label of Unsympathetic Spouse of the Year.

What can I say?

When I am up before 6am every morning to two spluttering, snot-infested infants who have gone all-out this time around and also developed a rip-roaring case of bacterial conjunctivitis, increasing the number of pus-oozing orifices by four in one fell swoop, I am not inclined to spare much mental energy on the plight of the more-or-less well.

Especially when I’m pinning the ungrateful little buggers down every two hours during the day to wipe the goop out and instill antibiotic drops as best as is possible in a moving, crying, screaming red-faced target. Twice over, obviously, meaning that either Saag or Naan has a good five minutes of witnessing their immediate future while their sister cops some well-intentioned unpleasantness.

They’re old enough to anticipate. 

This means that while I wrestle a screaming Naan to the ground, Saag duly legs it (as fast as humanly possible when you’re still walking like you’ve been riding a horse all day) to go hide in the nearest closet. It’s a shame the poor kid hasn’t figured out the doors are not soundproof and all I have to do is follow the chorus of ‘No no no no no NO!’ the poor child has taken to uttering when confronted with something which she simply does not approve.

Naan, on the other hand, and kind of thematically concordantly, wiggles her head from side to side and utters a resigned ‘Aii Ayyy Aiiihhhh AyAY!’.

I agree.

Just fat.

Alternatively entitled ‘How LS came THIS close to having to brush his teeth per-rectum for the rest of his natural’.

I was planning to crack out a much-overdue paragraph of snark (or twenty) about the fact that Goo.gle still in the face of all the non-kinky evidence believes me to be the font of all knowledge when it comes to certain hijinks involving certain orifices. For the sake of politeness, I shall hereby term them reverse traffic on the usually one-way Yellow-Pee Road and Hershey Highway.

Urgh.

Perhaps next time. I hope you can wait, dear reader, because Goo.gle has been bumped by a particularly tactless Act Of Man.

To set the scene, last night LS and I were lying in bed, but don’t worry, it’s not that kind of tale:

LS: ‘Can I ask you a question?’

Geohde: ‘I guess you just did, so yes?’

LS: ‘Smartarse. No another question, but it might sound strange.’

Geohde: ‘Yeeeesssss?’

LS: I hope he was thinking that the following was tantamount to leaving a suicide note, tidying up the will and topping oneself  ‘Um, well. Could you be pregnant?’

Geohde: in the Special Female Thin Ice Skating Voice ‘Why do you ask, my love?’

LS: Risking the continued attachment of his left arm to his shoulder by patting a certain abdomen lovingly ’It’s just that your belly seems to be sticking out, and I wondered….’

Geohde: Heavy sigh. Nice. ‘Okay. Let’s settle this easily. I want you to concentrate for me. Leaving aside the matter that shagging has a spectacularly poor personal track record when it comes to my uterus acquiring tenants, can you recall when we last actually had sex?’

LS: ‘……..’

Geohde:‘Ker-ching! Thank you.I’m probably just fat, darling. Although, more correctly I just have this minor issue with a bleeping great saggy gap in the middle of my abdomen from bearing your children. Sweet dreams.’

In other words, it may be CD100 around here, and if this were a game of cricket I’d be positively thrilled to reach a century, but I am comprehensively not knocked up. Trust me, I’ve wasted five bucks and checked just in case the latest rage in conception is the immaculate kind.

Regardless, I think the sex drought around these parts might last just a  little bit longer after that one. Along with the Washing Male Underwear drought.

It’s Snot Fair.

Really, it isn’t.

I can intellectually appreciate that in the normal course of events the average immune system only becomes capable of spotting and refusing admission to most germy happenings by dint of repeatedly stuffing it up.

Therefore, although I succumb to the inevitable with regards to infant experimentation with upper respiratory viruses, I do wish that my own hard-won immunity was worth a damn. It isn’t. Sadly, since viruses seem to mutate even faster than the patterns on a chameleon who’s dropped acid at a disco, I’m settling for stocking up on the tissues.

I just don’t like the fact that this means that invariably life in the Geohde household shall run as following for about the next five years:

1. Naan catches a cold and commences the usual ballet of mucoid misery, all the while sharing bodily secretions with anybody foolish enough to be caught within blast radius.
2. As a direct consequence of item #1 above, both parental units are rapidly conquered by the blasted thing. Accordingly, the parental unit possessing a Y-chromosome quickly declares himself bordering on critically ill and retires to the couch with blanket and tissues, where he remains for the duration, coughing with great drama until he’s quite sure all the fuss is over and it is safe to emerge.
3. Saag parties hard for a few days, revelling in the new-found freedom with which she has access to all the really fun toys. By ‘fun toys’ I mean Naan’s now freely draining snot, red-rimmed eyeballs and her dumdum which she is clearly feeling too poorly to guard with her usual screech and vicious snarl of ‘AHahahahahahahaAHAHAHAHHH!’
4. Naan begins to feel better and deigns to bury her face into my lap with affection and gratitude that it’s all over about a million times a day, meaning my crotch takes on a rather Suspiciously Gooey Appearance. Greensleeves has nothing on wearing second hand mucus on the outside of your trousers.
5. The inevitable happens and Saag is felled, spending about a week howling miserably at the unfairness of the world while Naan gleefully powers around the house at happy full-throttle.
6. Somehow in the only outing out of the house in an entire week, Naan catches another cold.
7. Stuff it. See #1 above. Rinse, lather, repeat.

We’re dealing with yet another round of Snot Chez MII, for about the fifty billionth time (give or take), but this particular permutation comes with bonus unhappy features, such as a free trial of Worryingly Floppy Naan (The ‘Blinking Is a Sign Of Life, Right?’ Edition) and Late Night Competitive Reverse Peristalsis.

When the Cranky Moppet herself does NOT briskly belt those who foolishly attempt to soothe her woes with a cuddle AND  yell vigorously about her lot in life to make sure we all know just how much she is suffering, damnit, I know it’s bad.

I can also claim the dubious honour of a hat-trick of nocturnal mega-vomits.

Vomits of the like I hope never to see again, let me make it quite clear, if only because waking to horror-film screams has this too-old-for-it individual rivalling an olympic sprinter from a REM-sleep start to see what the merry hell is going on.  There’s simply nothing like panting like an unfit big-bad-wolf at 3am, flipping on the light, finding a screeching infant dripping in recycled dinner and smelling of stomach acid, and then wondering if the local CSI unit have a clean-up service.

 The splatter looks like somebody filled a blender with about four colourful meals, omitted to use a lid in any way and cheerfully mashed the ’high’ button until it jammed.

I’m not overly fond of bathing said Unhappy Moppett at 3.30 am, either, because there’s chunks of dried vomit in what little hair she has. Even if Saag thinks the whole thing is simply hilarious and accordingly bounces up and down in her own cot with misdirected glee at the unscheduled late night party in her room.

Also, and finally (because Naan is waking up and so my arms shall be accordingly full of a truly irritable little bugger all afternoon and I need to take the opportunity to wee while I have a chance), I am quite over washing up the mess.

It turns out that recycled wet porridge comes out particularly light, fluffy and heavily distributed over bleeping everything if you omit the critical step of rinsing.

Punctuate THIS.

Sigh.

I love poor Long Suffering, my aptly named spouse, really I do.

Even though he has the propensity for massively getting right on my fried-egg  tits (that I am seriously thinking about, um, upgrading to something worth stuffing in a bra) on a daily basis, usually due to the repeated sin of minor domestic transgressions such as  leaving dirty plates and cups decoratively scattered around the house for the Picking Up Fairy to retrieve and transport to the dishwasher (me), grotty underwear and sweaty post-workout socks on the bedroom floor for the Hamper and Washing Fairy (also me), empty toilet rolls on the bathroom sink for the Rubbish Bin and Restocking From Just Underneath In The Bleeping Cupboard Fairy (me again), wet towels on the floor for the Drying Fairy to hang (oui, c’est moi), and carefully avoids ever stretching so far as to press ‘go’ on either the sodding washing machine OR the explodingly full dishwasher and waits for the Emptying Fairy to replenish the forks and makes do eating with spoons in the meantime (yes, me again), I do love him.

Yes, I may indulge in a little light mental imagery of ripping off his untidy head and filling the wet hole with all the garbage he leaves lying around, what what multitalented wifey fully occupied with twins who also bleeping works (for MONEY) as well as donning a set of wings in order to be Domestic FairyEngineer extraordinaire does not?

Okay, also sometimes I shamefully must confess I do stick up both middle digits behind his back and wave them about in a disturbingly jabby fashion. Or twiddle them in circles while muttering the most-unladylike ‘sit and rotate, honey’.

I do love him. Really. He can just be a git sometimes.

However, I am sure that I do many things that annoy the living snot out of him, and I know that after five-ish years of marriage, preceded by many years of living gleefully (but with boxes for furniture in some very mouldy rental properties in all the Funnest Parts of town) in Sin, neither of us are likely to change such habits and I married the man in full knowledge of his faults.

Kind of like having ticked the ‘I agree’ box on the product disclosure statement for Spouse 1.0.

Anyway, despite all of this he still can’t get away with saying ’Well, fuck you’ to me at 3 am, even if he spends the best part of the next two days grovelling and repeatedly explaining that there were quotation marks around it, and therefore it was not directed precisely AT me, per-se, but more a general statement of my attitude of being pissed at having been woken up by yet another bout of Prodfest (the ’09 STOP SNORING…poke…jab edition).

I don’t do punctuation at 3am, honey. Please take note,

Love (with only a small order of Bonus Steak Knife Set in the back),

Your Domestic Fairy Wife.

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Deja Screw…

Oh my.

With a title quite as salacious as that one I hardly know where to begin on how best to fill you all in on my day.

Suffice it to say that today from before the crack of dawn in true Hospital Ungodly AM fashion (why, just WHY I plead of you does a completely sedated, ventilated patient need to be reviewed in a hospital a full hour’s drive away for me before eight am? It’s not like they’re going anywhere in much of a hurry, after all, is it?) I was at work, generally Doing My Bit to win the never ending War On Disease.

Oh, and lest I forget, cars wrapped around trees in fits of pissed merriment and such.

I was, yet again to my eternal disappointment in my never-ending Sleep Until Daybreak campaign, peacefully wondering if a fourth cup of coffee was in order at the bedside of an especially poor prognosis type. Lest you deem me harsh and uncaring this was on the not-unreasonable grounds that there was little I, or anybody else for that matter, could do for the patient as such but a coffee would help my personal misery quotient at having to get up at 5 am to work this out. A bit, anyway. 

Then somebody else also came to see the patient, ending my reverie about all things coffee in the presence of brain death.

Turning to leave and perhaps fulfill my rather determined-but-refreshingly-simple desires in this world with regards to the liquid extraction of the coffee bean, I came shockingly face to face with a Certain Person I hadn’t seen in about, ooohhhh, seven years.

Right after that hideous drunken shag ruined a perfectly mildly flirtatious friendship and replaced it with a world of ‘I’ve seen your p.enis and I wish I hadn’t’. Oh, and, ‘Gee, the weather on the other side of the state is rather nice this decade, isn’t it?’.

So, rightly or wrongly, the inner Geohde that resides between my ears was fully occupied initiating the Do Not Blush sequence along with poking tiny fingers in virtual ears and singing ‘lalalalalala‘ in response to a rather unwanted but very present Blast from the Sexual Past.

It was all I could do to handover what little information was relevant i.e. he did not need to see this patient (so please for the love of all that is holy could he just bugger off. Now! Be anywhere but here!) without interjecting in my best Pretend Tourette’s ‘Brewers’ Droop!’, ‘Foster’s Flop!’, and the more simple ‘Willy! Weiner, knob, stick, wee-ee! ARagggghhhh’.

But I did, resist that is.

I did mention it was rather a bad shag, didn’t I?

On a scale of ’1′ to ‘Marshmall.ow in a coinslot’, call me a sweet tooth. I shall say no more on the matter lest I burn retinas in the process.

To conclude my tale, mortified, we both spent the rest of the morning very carefully avoiding all further contact at opposite ends of the ward.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Internet, the old adage that one should NEVER Screw The Crew is a good one. No matter how drunk you happen to be at the time.

Please learn from my example and you shall never have to face the owner of a willy you had done your best to consign to pe.nis history, before breakfast no less, at work ever again.

As for me, is it too late to change jobs?

Still with the bum references.

This post may, if you prefer your language on the slightly saltier side, be alternatively entitled ‘I do not give a hemorrhoidal rats rectum how you think you feel LS, I’m REALLY tired. You know, the kind of tired you get when you’ve had a total of six hours sleep in the last two days and counting’.

Except that’s a bit too long, isn’t it?

Perhaps ‘When the Hershey Highway encounters unexpected (pointy) angered northbound traffic’ would not be out of the question?

Or, even, ‘Kitchens: A veritable treasure trove of hitherto-undiscovered torture implements just begging for their own Explanatory Infomercial’. You could get a free set of steak knives with every thumbscrew. Buy an Iron Maiden, get one free. Special offer!

In other words, dear reader, my own personal ass-hol-eh continues to drive me moderately insane with his ongoing protests of dying fatigue when he doth finally emerge from the bed he’s been slothfully lying in all damn day to ‘catch up’ after a busy night spent prodding and poking his poor damn wife in the face, boobs, upper body and (once) even nostrils when she has the temerity to roll onto her back and, you know, snore just a little because she is so bloody goddamned tired already.

My airway patencey becomes borderline when I’m utterly shagged out, yes, and I may as a result make a noise like only a teeny-tiny truck or a petite jet-engine coasting through the bedroom, but for feck’s sake, the man has earplugs in and he’s been married to the sonorous yours truly for several years now.

It isn’t a new development, but the Bloody Prodfest is.

I don’t like that sort of behavior when I’ve spent a Fuzzy Brained day downing coffee like a thirsty desert rescuee in a failed bid to stop the godawful yawning and feel remotely human, complete with Extreme Solo Twin Wrangling. Especially when the Solo aspect of the Wrangling comes courtesy of a certain person on annual leave, no less, pissing about in bed all day and glued to the pay TV once awake.

In case you were curious as to the extreme element, I spent much of the day chasing a naked Saag AND  Naan around the house and oftentimes futilely trying to stop them crawling through each other’s wee, or worse, poo.

 The poor buggers both have some nasty Spotty Botty, the prescription for which Chez MII is a Good Airing (never fails me but is damn hard on the reflexes, needless to say), but oh how my carpets do suffer the consequences when I’m tired and Slow On The Uptake.

In other words, my beloved sh!t woke me up about six times an hour last night between those heady hours of midnight and three am when I personally like to indulge in a little REM mixed in with some slow wave sleep, just for kicks.

Oh, and then if that wasn’t enough, I’ve gone and acquired a nasty urinary tract infection.

Hands up those who were also up three times an hour since three am with the burning desire to urinate, only to pass a pointless teaspoon of widdle on each occasion with a sensation not un-akin to as if some nasty sod had filled one’s bladder with razor blades while you weren’t looking?

See, kids, I told you se.x was a bad idea. Stuff pregnancy as the thing to be afeared of, it’s the pissing barbed wire I find most terrifying.

Fortunately, given my current fatigue and mood, I don’t think I’m going to be having much of the provoking activity in the near future so here’s hoping the gods of ur.al do their thing today and I sleep tonight.

Wish me luck.

PS. New pictures up at Terrible Twosome. One of you very politely nudged me that it had indeed been some time and small people do tend to change over nearly half a year.

PSS. Spellchecker is doing the ‘ing’ thing again and glueing words together. I may have missed a few in the Swear-ey Unsticking that followed. Ass-hol-eh to THAT, too.

PSSS. Next up. BOTW. Much belated, again.